To finish out what was unofficially Vaccine Week™, prime minister Justin Trudeau announced that he had tasked Major General Dany Fortin, the country’s former NATO commander in Iraq, to head up the vaccine distribution response – because apparently, we have decided that if the Americans have a military response, we need one too. Also, Doug Ford went and hired former Chief of Defence Staff, General Rick Hillier, at great expense to head up Ontario’s vaccine roll-out, so Trudeau apparently felt the need to compete there too.

Paul Wells correctly noted on Power & Politics yesterday that this is mostly theatre, because the real work is being done by anonymous bureaucrats in public health offices in each province, who do the work of immunization on a constant basis. Nevertheless, the impulse to follow the American lead is so strong in Canadian politics, even when it makes no sense. In particular, the Americans needed their military to coordinate vaccine roll-out because they don’t have anything that resembles centralised healthcare delivery in any way. It’s more of a need than we have here, but hey, it looks like we’re being super serious that we have generals coordinating this. And it’s not to say that there wasn’t already coordination between the Public Health Agency and the Canadian Forces for any logistics help they might provide, which could mean transport or medical personnel (because remember that our complement of doctors and nurses are already being overloaded with COVID hospitalisations), but it wasn’t going to be a big Thing with the military in charge. Now Trudeau has pulled that trigger, and I’m not sure exactly what value he hopes to add to the equation from it.

Trudeau also stated yesterday that he estimates that most Canadians will be vaccinated by September of next year, but of course, this remains a bit of a moving target based on the number of vaccines available. If another candidate becomes viable and goes into production, that could cut the time down as well (assuming no logistics bottlenecks along the way). But as with anything, it’s a bit of a moving target, and there are still too many unknown variables to say anything definitive, despite the constant demands to, but that’s where we are. We’ll see if this fixation continues next week, or if the fiscal update will become the prevailing narrative instead.

Good reads:

• PMO accidentally sent out their pre-write of the readout of Trudeau’s call with Erin O’Toole before it happened, because of course they stepped on yet another rake.
• Federal public health authorities don’t have a good grasp of the data on how many homeless people in Canada have died of COVID.
• A third rapid test system is being delivered to Canada.
• The Lobbying Commissioner says that she has forwarded three files to the RCMP since the beginning of the pandemic.
• The Clerk of the Privy Council (predictably) says that he needs more time to assemble the millions of documents for the Conservatives’ fishing expedition.
• Senator Murray Sinclair has announced he will retire early at the end of January to focus on his memoirs and Indigenous mentorship at a Manitoba law firm.
• Jen Gerson reminds the COVID conspiracy theorists that there is no shadowy hyper-competent cabal running the world – just a bunch of largely inept bureaucrats.
• Colby Cosh offers a meditation on the Quebec Court of Appeal decision on the Quebec mosque shooter’s sentencing, and the meaning of “cruel and unusual.”
• My weekend column looks at everyone focusing on Chief Medical Officers of Health, when they should be directing their attention to premiers and their decisions.

Odds and ends:

Here is a look at some Algonquin artefacts that have been found on Parliament Hill during the renovations.

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